They should think about ignoring it in my opinion. A lot of those points are fine for people who have all day to play an mmo

^
The points op brings up are nice and all, i for example love dark souls& demon's souls. But it doesnt fit an mmo, the thing that would probably happen if this was introduced is that many subs except for the people that are either without a job/school or something like that., would ultimately leave. because oh look i just died against a mob, now i have to run for 15 minutes, f* this ill go play LoL/Dota (whatever mp game you can think of).

A dangerous world. Totally agree with this one it sucks having no threat of danger anymore, short of running into a 10 level higher zone one can pretty much pull all mobs in sight and kill with with no / minimal risk of death.

If you didn't die a bunch while leveling in Pandaria, then you either played it as safe as possible, or were playing a blood DK/hunter/warlock.

I actually think this would not be such a bad idea, IF the world were designed for it.

In WoW, someone who is really only interested in raids and the latest dailies travels between the Island of Thunder, the Shrine of Two Moons as his capital, and Orgrimmar for the auction house.

That's an awful lot of distance to cover, just to raid.

Suppose the Island of Thunder had its own auction house, reforger, bank - not everything a true capital has, but all the most important things. Then players have much less distance to travel. If they have less distance to travel, travelling can be made more difficult, without taking more time.

So what's the advantage? Instead of flying all over the continent seeing everything all at once, people would spend more time in one place doing one thing, and move to another place to do something else when they get bored.

i disagree with every single point and actually i think that those ideas wouldn't have been good even for a game from 15 years ago.
but hey, if blizzard wants a game with 10k subscribers it could actually reach that goal this way.

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Originally Posted by Arothand

People need to get rid of this "stand in awe at the top raiders" mentality.

fully agree with this. people don't look in awe at people killing pixels and playing 16 hours a day. they simply don't.

You seem to be stereotyping quite a bit. I was once a raider in WoW, now I only do content solo, and I love battle pets. Just because you've met a lot of elitists doesn't mean everyone who enjoys more challenging games are uptight assholes hating on everyone.

Is it really that strange that some gamers enjoy playing a game that gives a sense of achievement? Take rock climbing for example, at first you might like to climb whatever mountain or hill that you have access to, but later on you might want to try higher mountains, more dangerous places, and before you know it you're making plans to climb Mount Everest. But why would you do that? You could die! It's because pushing yourself is something people find fun, but probably in different areas of our lives. I rarely push myself in anything I do outdoors, so I do it in games.

Of course I'm generalizing quite a bit. There's nothing wrong with it. If I built in extra paragraphs and relativizations in any little bit I write, I wouldn't be making much points in all that babble any more.

The mentality I was describing follows a very strict pattern, it's all over the MMO Champ forums and while one can of course choose to condemn my statements wholesale, it doesn't change the fact that they hit the nail on the head in over 90%. If you're the exception, well, great for you. Don't distract from the discussion. It's just PC BS. The few exceptions that might be there just don't matter, they're not the point of the discussion.

Anyways, you're just being vague for the sake of it. I get what you're saying, but still, we're talking about very specific things here. The top post was very specific, and you're kind of distracting from that right now. It's not generally about "sense of achievement" or whatever. Whoever plays a video game does it for a sense of achievement, why fool ourselves? The post isn't about that. It's exactly about what I described: an uptight, stubborn attitude, seriousness, struggle and penalization and overall silly ideas and expectations on Blizzard to shift design ideals to a dark, punishing place the game never was in, not even in 2005. One wonders where the hell these people actually come from.

Originally Posted by Rassium

I like General Off-Topic. It's really cool to see people with My Little Pony avatars advocating for genocide.

I absolutely love this set of suggestions because it crops up about every 3 years or so and someone tries to make their half remembered through rose colored glasses version of Early EQ/Late UO/DAoC and then it bombs because well, we can go through it point by point.

1. Harsh Death Penalty and Corpse RunsDeath in a fantasy virtual world needs to have serious consequences. Without a tangible death penalty players will never respect your virtual world. Substantive loss such as experience and requiring players to retrieve their corpses is a basic requirement of bringing back that EverQuest magic. Without the possibility of loss, a virtual world becomes a safe amusement park. Let’s also not forget that a death penalty can be mitigated by player resurrections and corpse finding abilities given to special classes — both are class interdependence design elements that help to strengthen the community.
Failure is not bad; in fact it makes us better players. Pandering creates lazy and inept players. Sure, some players will hate a MMO company that brings back a harsh death penalty but that is the price of leadership. You’re not here to be popular; you’re here to make the very best virtual world! Uneasy lies head that wears the crown. Better to be hated by many, loved by a few and respected by all.

This first one is interesting. It immediately cuts to an interesting dilemma in that the only means of "punishing" a player for failure is by costing them time. Its just a question of how much. WoW tends to be somewhere in between 1-5 minutes of time. It takes a little bit to get back to your body, and a little bit to pay your repair bill. If you are in a raid group maybe even call it 10 minutes, since it can take some time to reassemble to try again. What he wants isn't a change, but instead just a greater cost of time, call it 1-5 hours if my hazy EQ memories are correct. The problem with this line of thinking is that every hour spent making up for a death is an hour spent not doing something else. 1-5 minutes is an annoyance, IME it is enough of one that people can learn from their mistakes, but my experience isn't his. What he is suggesting could teach players caution, or it could just piss them off. It certainly would err toward the latter if he expects content to be hard since you can only really learn by doing in a MMO.

Great post first of all.

I'd like to add here that if you corpserun and immediately die again, in other words you fail again, the penalty is increased not only in repair but cumulatively on the amount of time you need to wait for resurrection. This gives the player more time to reevaluate their sins (). Then there is spirit healer and resurrection sickness.

I'd like to add here that if you corpserun and immediately die again, in other words you fail again, the penalty is increased not only in repair but cumulatively on the amount of time you need to wait for resurrection. This gives the player more time to reevaluate their sins (). Then there is spirit healer and resurrection sickness.

But how is that fun!? Games are supposed to be entertaining and sitting there staring at my corpse because I'm on a res timer is not entertaining, it's just needlessly frustrating. All this would do is increase ganking and griefing while reducing the amount of actual fair(ish) world PvP. No one is going to go on an epic city raid or a PvP event (used to have them in Gurubashi Arena) if they know they will be sat there dead for the majority of the time. It's far better when people are encouraged to get involved and have a go, it is an MMO after all, participation is the goal here.

The philosophy behind WoW is fundamentally different to the one behind games like EQ and Eve. At its core, WoW is all about instanced content where the world is almost secondary - The devs actively try to push players into doing those things, and the majority of its subscribers seem to enjoy them (instanced arenas, instanced BGs, instanced dungeons, instanced raids, even instanced solo'ing..). The more traditional MMORPGs are all about providing a world where anyone can do anything they want, and treat it just like the real world.

IMO the concept of spending time in a 'virtual world' simply because its an alternative reality has never been a popular idea - all popular games fundamentally place gameplay above realism. (Realism in terms of audio/visuals/atmosphere/emotion/etc = GOOD but realism in terms of simply mirroring the behaviour of reality actually doesn't make exciting gameplay)

Obviously, a lot of people play WoW to escape the "real" world, so there are all kinds of things which suck in real life just as they suck in a virtual world (Things such as death, stealing and taxes to name a few). But there are also plenty of good things out in the real world, like friends, teamwork and variety which do enrich our real lives as much as they should enrich a game experience - the developers need to encourage all the good things without letting too many of the bad ones creep in (either through intented game mechanics or through anonymous "griefers").

Some parts of the OP do make sense though - mostly no. 2 about grouping; We're talking about multi-player gaming afterall. If there's no grouping then it's either a single-player game or a free-for-all deathmatch; and neither of those are particularly fitting for an MMORPG. One of my favourite aspects of WoW has always been the 5-man instanced dungeon content, and there's an awful lot to be said in favour of traditional WoW dungeons and TBC heroics IMO.

Also the point about having more dynamic content - that seems to be the way forward for all kinds of game genres; we all know how repetetive some things are in games; dailies and scripted events are fun the first time, but after a while they may just as well just not exist. I often think dungeons and raids would have increased replayability if neither me nor my addons could accurately predict exactly what was going to happen and when. There's plenty which developers could do from an A.I. perspective to provide something similar to the traditional "Game Master" aspect of D&D. (Assuming that MMORPGs are still supposed to at least loosely based on D&D gameplay)

i disagree with every single point and actually i think that those ideas wouldn't have been good even for a game from 15 years ago.
but hey, if blizzard wants a game with 10k subscribers it could actually reach that goal this way.

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fully agree with this. people don't look in awe at people killing pixels and playing 16 hours a day. they simply don't.

I think the original EverQuest still has more than 10,000 subscribers. Well, before SOE adopted their Free to Play. Your Way. campaign.

Ironically, everyone's going knee jerk in response to this without stopping to realize, you could apply almost all of this to WoW to various degrees and all it would do is take you back to Wrath, then TBC, then Classic before you got to EverQuest levels of application.

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Originally Posted by Bench333

Also the point about having more dynamic content - that seems to be the way forward for all kinds of game genres; we all know how repetetive some things are in games; dailies and scripted events are fun the first time, but after a while they may just as well just not exist. I often think dungeons and raids would have increased replayability if neither me nor my addons could accurately predict exactly what was going to happen and when. There's plenty which developers could do from an A.I. perspective to provide something similar to the traditional "Game Master" aspect of D&D. (Assuming that MMORPGs are still supposed to at least loosely based on D&D gameplay)

I wonder how EQNext's emergent AI will be applied to dungeon/raid bosses....

But how is that fun!? Games are supposed to be entertaining and sitting there staring at my corpse because I'm on a res timer is not entertaining, it's just needlessly frustrating. All this would do is increase ganking and griefing while reducing the amount of actual fair(ish) world PvP. No one is going to go on an epic city raid or a PvP event (used to have them in Gurubashi Arena) if they know they will be sat there dead for the majority of the time. It's far better when people are encouraged to get involved and have a go, it is an MMO after all, participation is the goal here.

Without work no pleasure. What goes up, must go down. Without punishment, no reward. It isn't fun wiping a few weeks on Lei Shen Heroic, but once you finally got it down the reward and fun is finally there because it was hard work to achieve it.

If players can respawn quicker than the zerg you get... well, zerg, like GW2. Although even that has a corpserun. I don't know any fantasy MMORPG which doesn't involve a corpserun. If I remember SWTOR just had different spawn points.

Addendum: there are other ways to prevent ganking/griefing. I've posted some suggestions in other threads. In my world, there'd be 3 types of realm: Normal, PvP, and PvE. Most realms would be Normal. There is world PvP available, but you are not able to engage PvP versus players who are 30 levels under you; only about 4 levels difference combat is possible. PvP would be pure PvP realm, like it is now, and PvE realm would be pure PvE realm like it is now. Most realms would be Normal type, and all current PvP realms would be converted to this type.

I'd be very interested in trying a mmo that followed these guidelines, it would be cool as hell. On that note, I would never want this in WoW since it is good as it as, as a very very simplistic/easy just for fun mmo.

P.S. no need to tell me heroic raiding is hard me and the 1% players that actually do them already know.